


chase embers ‘neath the stars

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Brokeback Mountain AU, Introspection, M/M, Quiet mornings, fellas is it gay to raise a lamb together and you're both cowboys and you're both in love?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25609144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: Brokeback is the stage on which they play out this little farce. Like Eugene doesn’t have a wife and two kids waiting at home, waiting on daddy to get back home to them. Like Snafu doesn’t spend the off-season throwing himself at bulls and willing something to break him. Like they won’t come down off the mountain in May and go their separate ways, and won’t speak until Brokeback drags them back again. And each time they come together it’s like they’ve never been apart.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 12
Kudos: 25
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	chase embers ‘neath the stars

**Author's Note:**

> prompt fill for 'rain', day four of sledgefu week :~)

The drumming of rain on the tent wakes Eugene before his body clock does. The steady, comforting patter of drops hitting the canvas. He lies there for a while and listens to it, Snafu sleeping warm and quiet by his side, his face close to Eugene’s head. The lamb sleeps between them, though when Eugene shifts she begins to stir too, nudging her head against his belly in search of something to eat. 

He shushes her, scratches at her wooly neck to soothe her. Snafu rolls onto his back, eyes flickering with a dream. The tent smells warm and musky, the heat from their bodies leaving the walls damp with condensation. Eugene touches his fingernail to a bead of wet, and watches it fall, collecting its brothers on the way down in one slick trail of water. The rain is coming a little harder now. A white-noise rushing sound that makes him feel drowsy, makes his eyelids feel heavy.

The lamb nudges at him again. Eugene sighs, and leaves Snafu to sleep. 

Outside the world is slick and green, the clouds low and thick and blanketing the land. The rain isn’t as heavy as its sound on the sides of the tent had made it seem; nothing more than a cool, steady drizzle that Eugene turns up his collar against. It’s refreshing, washes the dregs of sleep away from Eugene just as well as a dip in the stream does, and he tips his face up into it as he stretches. There’s been a spate of rainy days since spring had begun to thaw the mountain. He feels conflicted about its coming. Spring means warmth, means new life, means the mountain becomes awash with wildflowers, with the delicate smell of them. It also means the lambing season, which is another thing to worry about. It means he and Snafu are nearing the end of another season on Brokeback. 

Eugene glances back through the flap of the tent, into the shadowy recesses. Snafu is an indistinct lump of blankets, rolled over onto his side again. The lamb, who considers him her mother, nudges its nose into his collar. 

“Gene,” he mumbles, and rolls over. Eugene’s heart tugs in his chest. 

Mornings are quiet on Brokeback. Snafu’s slower to rise with each year that passes, to the point where Eugene has begun to wake him before the morning becomes too late. Eugene’s clock is set to that specific time that all parents adopt; jolting him awake at dawn ready to wrangle two children through their mornings and into school, only to re-orient himself a moment later. Here there’s no children, no responsibilities beyond what he’s paid to do. Just the watery grey dawn, and Snafu’s warm body to curl around to try and snatch some more sleep. 

He doesn’t go back to sleep this morning. The rain has turned their fire to wet ash; Eugene builds up a new one with the dry wood he and Snafu had stashed under a tarp a few weeks ago as he smokes a morning cigarette. The lamb is still in the tent with Snafu, despite her waking him up to eat. Eugene pokes at the fire, crouched on his haunches with his cigarette keeping dry only by the grace of the brim of his hat, and looks out across the land.

Ever since the days had started getting longer, Eugene’s been enjoying his mornings more. Waking to snow, to blue-black dawn, was never his favourite part of this. Everything’s a chore when the snows come. Bathing, eating, working. Eugene can welcome a few spring showers, if it means the runoff from the top of the mountains that he has to dip his naked ass into to wash is a little less icy. He smiles at his own joke, eyes tracking the movement of the flock as they graze below. A hawk wheels through the grey sky, pulling Eugene’s attention up to watch it.

The first year he’d done this, Eugene was sure he’d never return again. That was nearly fifteen seasons ago, give or take. Brokeback has a way of burrowing into your bones. The silence, the stillness. The feeling of being on top of the world, while at the same time being distinctly apart from it. Their very own Olympus. Eugene ashes his cigarette between the toes of his boots, and listens to the firewood spit and pop as the flames begin to take hold. 

Rustling comes from behind him, and then Snafu’s voice, still rough from sleep, “You put coffee on?”

Eugene turns, a smile stretching his mouth as he spots Snafu, standing in front of the open tent looking very bleary in the pale daylight. The lamb is tucked under his arm, carried like a football. As Eugene watches, Snafu coaxes her into the front of his thick calfskin, until just her little head is visible, bobbing around in the open collar. 

“Mornin’ to you too,” Eugene says, and grins when Snafu sets his hands on his hips and whistles, eyes out on the horizon — or rather the lack of it, considering the mistiness of the day.

“Clouds’re low,” he comments, a hand cradling the shape of the lamb through his clothes. “Gonna have to keep a good eye out.”

“Come sit first,” Eugene says, turning back to the fire. He shows it his palms, warming his stiff fingers as Snafu comes to sit next to him. 

“Mmm, no coffee,” Snafu says, leaning in close to bump his lips to Eugene’s cheek. “Some wife you’d make.”

“Not in front of the baby,” Eugene mutters, wryly, and tucks his grin down into the collar of his coat as Snafu crows a laugh. 

Brokeback is the stage on which they play out this little farce. Like Eugene doesn’t have a wife and two kids waiting at home, waiting on daddy to get back home to them. Like Snafu doesn’t spend the off-season throwing himself at bulls and willing something to break him. Like they won’t come down off the mountain in May and go their separate ways, and won’t speak until Brokeback drags them back again. And each time they come together it’s like they’ve never been apart. Eugene has been telling himself for a decade that if they ever reunite and he doesn’t feel that intangible spark, it’s over. He’s still waiting for whatever lingers between them to fizzle; still watching it get stronger with every single year.

Snafu’s hand dips into the breast pocket of Eugene’s coat, and emerges victorious with a book of matches. The lamb bleats weakly, and Snafu coos at it, patting at the lump of its body in his clothes. 

“Lemme have a smoke,” he tells it. “Genie’s gonna warm you some milk.”

The rain makes the fire spit, frosts Snafu’s dark, wild curls with fine droplets of water. The lamb bleats again, and Snafu shushes it, cigarette dangling from his lip, smoke clinging to the brim of his hat. Its ear flicks, dislodging a fine smattering of rain across Snafu’s face, which he laughs at and recoils from. Eugene’s heart feels like a warm, heavy weight in his chest, like a ballast swinging him into Snafu’s orbit. He loves watching Snafu with animals. He’s gentle with them in a way that he’s not even gentle with Eugene. The only time he can bring himself to kill something is when a fox or a wolf is threatening the flock, and even then Eugene knows he often shoots to miss, to scare. He’s a dab hand with a shotgun. If he was aiming right, there’d be a whole lot less wolves on Brokeback. 

Eugene warms the lamb’s breakfast before anything else. Milk in the saucepan; he and Snafu have been drinking their coffee dirt-black since the lamb had been born. Three nights ago, Snafu bloodying his hands by firelight, his face serious and set as he’d tugged and pulled until the lamb had slipped free. The ewe had wanted nothing to do with it. Eugene resigned himself to it dying. Instead, Snafu had rubbed it down and bullied it until it got up and walked around, and the two have been inseparable since. 

“You gonna take that thing home with you?” Eugene asks, even though talking about the real world on Brokeback isn’t strictly allowed. Snafu, tipping the improvised bottle made of a hammered tin mug to the lamb’s greedy mouth, shoots Eugene a shuttered glance.

“I might,” he mutters. “Gotta have somethin’ to keep me company.”

Eugene doesn’t reply. Instead, he just cracks a couple eggs into the frying pan he’s settled over the embers of the fire, and sits back to watch the oil spit. The lamb falls asleep after eating, which means that Eugene and Snafu can eat their own breakfast without its bleating. The smell of hot fat and damp sheep is in the air; the clouds still creeping low and slow over the ground even as the sun rises. It looks like a watery fried egg up there, the sky white and flat and still raining on them. 

“Ain’t it nice when it’s like this?” Snafu asks, eyes faraway. “I love the rain.”

Eugene does too. Loves the way it seems to wash the world clean. Loves the rich, earthy smell it kicks up, the perfume of the mountain magnified by a thousand. Snafu stands, and holds out his hand for Eugene’s plate; together they wander down to the stream that runs a few feet away to wash up. 

“Got a fence to mend up,” Eugene comments, knees to the riverbank as he scoops water to his face to wash the night from himself. It’s cold enough to make him gasp, the water making tracks down the collar of his jacket, wetting the front of his hair. “Reckon I can do that while you’re checkin’ the flock.”

“Sounds good,” Snafu says, and the lamb squirms between their chests when he pulls Eugene close to kiss him, releasing him with a playful grin and a muttered, “Thanks for breakfast.”

It’s mornings like these where what they’re doing feels halfway to normal. So normal that for a time Eugene manages to convince himself that it’s not wrong, everything that Brokeback witnesses. When Snafu kisses him, when they lie together in their tent and make up dreams of a future that’ll never happen. When Eugene tests his teeth to the nape of Snafu’s neck, buried so deep inside him that they become one. One set of lungs, one brain, one slick and swollen heart. Eugene’s never met a man who can love like Snafu does. Loves so much that he’s always lonely, loves so much that he takes to cheap and painful thrills just to try and shrink that big red heart. 

Eugene grips hold of Snafu’s chin, smiling at the grin on the man’s sweet, stubbled face. “You’re spoilin’ that lamb,” he says, instead of all the things clustering at the back of his throat. Snafu knows them all anyway. All the vague plans to run away together, to come down from Brokeback and get in the same car and drive. Drive until they reach somewhere they can be together. They never come to fruition. Eugene knows he’s more to blame than Snafu is; transient old rodeo boy that he is. If they’d been brave enough five years ago, there would’ve been nothing stopping them. Now, there’s two things; children bleating at Eugene just like that lamb.

“Gotta spoil somethin’,” Snafu mumbles, and Eugene releases him. 

They part for the day. The rain gets heavier. Fat, wet droplets that Eugene hunches his shoulders to, bouncing off the trees and the ground with the same white-noise rush that had woken him that morning. The smell of the world is stronger now, and heady. His hands slick with water as he works at the metre of fence that had come down, roll of wire tucked in his armpit and his horse standing still and sodden nearby, the water glancing off its flanks, mane slick to its neck. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, patting at her neck as he comes to retrieve a pair of wire cutters from the saddlebag. “At least we’re both out here in it.”

She’s not his horse; just on loan from their boss. Still, Eugene has an attachment to her. He leads her to some shelter under a pine, and wonders if Snafu is out in the rain with that lamb in his coat. He hasn’t named it yet, in case it dies. He’s always morbid about the things he loves.

Years ago, he’d turned to Eugene in the darkness of their tent, and asked, “If I died, how would you know?”

The night was so dark that it had texture to it. Velvety, like the cropped-close hair at the back of Snafu’s head at the start of the season. By May it’s always grown out into thick, untameable curls. Eugene remembers settling his fingers into that new growth, and pulling Snafu close to nestle into his neck. Wintertime, when the sun set while they were still on horseback, and the wolves ruled the darkness. 

“D’you plan on dyin’ anytime soon?” he asks, and Snafu had just snorted. An exhale of warm air against Eugene’s throat. He knows that Snafu must’ve felt how his heart-rate picked up. This was back in their twenties, before Snafu had really aged out of the rodeo scene. Every year he had a new collection of scars. Eugene used to get sick, sometimes, imagining driving up to that trailer to get hired on for Brokeback, and finding another man in Snafu’s place. 

He wouldn’t know. It’s as simple as that. One day his life would have Snafu in it; as vibrant and contradictory and frustrating as he is. The next it would not. And the world would still turn, as unfair as it would be. 

The lamb is bleating again when Eugene drags himself back to their circle of civilisation, his face icy cold from the rain whipping under his hat, but warm beneath his layers. Snafu coaxes the thing beneath Eugene’s jacket anyway, worrying at both of their coldness. It stinks, that farmyard smell of lanolin on its coat. Still, he ducks his chin to its head and feeds it milk once Snafu has warmed it; the other man pink-cheeked from the cold, and quiet. 

“Won a buckle up in Laramie,” Snafu offers, over dinner. Brokeback fosters silence like nothing else; it’s his first words in hours. Eugene makes an interested noise, glancing up from his plate of food. The lamb is asleep in the tent, so this feels stupidly like adult talk; the kind of quiet conversation Eugene is accustomed to with his wife once she’s put the kids to bed. Snafu clears his throat, and scrapes at his tin plate. The rain has eased since night had fallen; now it’s barely more than a mist to fog the evening sky. “Thought about droppin’ by to see you.”

Eugene chews that over. “You think I could pass you off as a buddy?” he asks, and Snafu laughs.

“Now that’s a dangerous road to go down.”

They keep their lives outside of Brokeback separate for a reason. Eugene doesn’t know what he’d do if he saw Snafu stand in his house, or talk to his wife, his kids. 

“I suppose so,” he mutters, but wonders why Snafu brought it up only to reject even the idea of meeting off the mountain. To let Eugene know he’s thinking of him? Eugene knows that. Can feel it resonate across the state. At home, when he dreams, it’s always of this. Green country, the soft fall of rain, the sea of wildflowers that spring sows, Snafu’s hands tucked in the space between coat and sweater, warming himself. The smell of him, of sweat hard-won from hard work, of the cheap soap they use and that distinctive smell of his hair. Eugene wakes guilty every time from dreams of Snafu, of Brokeback; his wife sleeps through it all, somehow still none the wiser to Eugene’s distraction. 

“You ever feel like you’re still up here, even when you go home?” he asks, watching the way the firelight catches in Snafu’s hair, warms the side of his face. Stubbled, rough, and handsome. Pretty, if a man can be called that. The softness of his mouth against the hard line of his jaw. Eugene loves to look at him.

“All the time,” Snafu says, immediately, and then he snorts. He tugs his pouch of tobacco from an inside pocket, and sets to rolling himself a cigarette. Tosses a pinch of it into the fire, some old superstition of his, and Eugene watches it get eaten up greedily. “Figured it was just me.”

Eugene rolls his eyes at that, gazing into the fire. The dancing flames are hypnotic, the wood popping and shifting as it burns. “Nah,” he says, slowly. “Back home it feels like I’m dreamin’ all the time, and the only time I wake up is when I get back here.”

Snafu shifts closer to him, their butts parked on the same log, sodden from the day’s rain. When Eugene kisses him, he tastes like whiskey; Eugene grins as he worms his hand into Snafu’s jacket, fingers searching out the body-warmed metal flask tucked away alongside his tobacco. Laughing, Snafu just watches. “You coulda just asked,” he mutters, taking a draw from his cigarette as Eugene manages to extract the flask. 

“You woulda lied and said you don’t have it,” Eugene counters with. Snafu laughs again, and doesn’t deny it. 

The rain starts back up. Nothing more than a light patter to add to the chorus of nighttime around them. Snafu’s hand is on Eugene’s knee, his eyes faraway on the world beyond their circle of firelight. He clears his throat, and then takes a drag from the ends of his cigarette. Clears it again. Eugene waits patiently, turning the flask over in his hands so the firelight catches at it, slides slickly over the silver surface. _MAS_. Eugene wonders if his rodeo buddies know his real name, or whether that’s a privilege awarded only to Eugene and Snafu’s own long-dead parents. 

“It gets harder every year to not come to Laramie and find you,” Snafu admits, finally. “The only thing keepin’ me from it is knowin’ how mad you’d be.”

Eugene unscrews the cap of the flask, and takes a pull from it. The whiskey warms his chest, soothes the squeezing of his heart in there. “I wouldn’t be mad,” is all he says, and they fall silent. The flask changes hands. Now that they’re empty, Eugene doesn’t know what to do with his hands; he twists them together between his knees, and sighs. “I’d just be scared, I think.”

Talk of the world beyond Brokeback is banned for his very reason. Even something lighthearted boils down to sadness. Eugene thinks of himself the very first year he signed on to work up here; young and made nervous by Snafu’s evident dislike of him, his silence. Would he go back and tell that boy to get back in his truck and find some other work, to save him from all this heartache? Probably not. Eugene can’t imagine his life without Snafu in it, even if it’s only for snatches of time. It all comes down to how much happiness makes the sadness worth it. To live like this for six months out of the year is happiness enough. 

Snafu squeezes at Eugene’s knee, drawing him up and out of his thoughts. He’s good at it. Knows exactly when Eugene is retreating so far that it’d be hard to resurface.

“I ain’t gonna show up unannounced,” he murmurs, the firelight shining in his pale eyes. Eugene looks at him, helpless, _I want you to_ caught at the end of his tongue.

“You ever think we’re too old for this?” he asks, instead, and huffs when Snafu laughs. “What, you don’t think?”

“Do you?” The firelight catches in his teeth, then is replaced by the shine of the flask. 

Rain patters on the brim of Eugene’s hat, the night cool and fragrant, fresh-smelling. “Sometimes,” Eugene says. “Yeah, sometimes.”

Snafu nods, and glances away, stroking his hand over his chin. The night is so quiet that Eugene can hear the rasp of his hand passing over his stubble. “That’s because you grew up,” he says, and laughs again. It’s not really funny, but Eugene laughs too. “The only thing that got older for me is my body.”

“And that’s from those damn bulls,” Eugene adds, and Snafu snorts, eyes on the flask in his hands. He looks younger by firelight; the warm, flickering light smoothing all the traces of age from his face. When Eugene touches his arm, Snafu’s misted by the rain, wet to the touch. 

“We should sleep,” he says, and Snafu kisses him instead. Kisses him deep, and wanting, Eugene’s hand smearing rainwater everywhere it goes. Sinking into Snafu’s damp mass of curls, over the slick skin of his stubbled jaw, dipping down below the collar of his coat to rest his fingertips against the warm skin of Snafu’s back. The night is so misty, and the cloud-cover so low and dense, that for once they’re not watched by anything. Not Brokeback, it’s sullen blue peaks. Not God, who must look away anyway. No one to see the way that Snafu kisses at Eugene’s mouth like he loves him, like he adores him; no one to see Eugene kiss Snafu the same. 

It’s just the two of them, and the rain, washing the last dregs of winter from Brokeback’s watchful face.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
